Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.
Re: Marc Andreesen
Author: Jacob Levy Posted: 9/11/1999; 10:06:58 PM Topic: Marc Andreesen Msg #: 10935 (In response to 10917) Prev/Next: 10934 / 10936
What got Marc pushed out of AOL is probably how he handled the IM mess. As CTO he was responsible for how to handle the attack by M$ on this valuable AOL asset. He probably was the wrong person to take this on, having been knocked around by M$ in his previous encounter with them, on the browser wars front.Bill Raduchel who takes over from Marc as AOL CTO and harks from Sun Microsystems comes with a bit of net blindness history of his own. There's a persistent rumor that he was the executive in the urban folklore tale who wanted to charge each user of the WWW in his company $50 per year for access to the web because it was "just a waste of time" and "not business-essential". On the other hand, give him credit for a very successful series of deals and acquisitions for Sun, culminating in the Star Office deal.
Being CTO of AOL is today probably *the* most crucial position in the computer industry that will have *the* most influence over the eventual outcome of the consumer Internet access market dominance battle. Steve Case realizes this. Bill Raduchel realizes this. Bill Gates realizes it. It's going to be very interesting to see what AOL will do. Will they be able to finally push the OS into commodity space and become king of the hill for net access and over-the-net application delivery? Or will M$ be the winner?
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